In December of last year I left MediaTemple for WebFaction. And in less than a year I am back at MediaTemple. This is now my third time with MT. What is with this love that I have for them?

Well, this time I’m on their Dedicated Virtual (DV) plan. Their grid server plans may be great for some, but I will no longer use them or recommend them. MediaTemple has always had great support. I love their panel, and they have a great knowledge base and are very pro active in the community. Their Grid Server, however, can just be downright slow at times.

However, I’ve come around to finally realizing and admitting that that is just what you get when you are paying under 20$/month for hosting. I can’t afford dedicated hosting. So Dedicated Virtual is the next best thing. And in my opinion, MT offers a great package. And since I now host my email with Gmail, I don’t even need but half of the space on the plan.

So I made a pact. A friend of mine, Nate Sprehe of the newly founded Almanac went in with me to split a DV account. We each only get 10gig and 15 domains. However, it’s plenty for me. I’m paying $20/month and getting dedicated service.

Don’t get me wrong, WebFaction was better than most shared hosting providers, despite their unique way of managing sites and domains. Towards the end they did have some email problems which prompted me to move all my email to Gmail – a move which I highly recommend. SpamAssasin can not compete with Gmail. In addition to email, I had some issues with a couple aspects of the WebFaction setup:

• Email user names. You can have name@domain.com as your email. However, that isn’t what you log in as. You log in as a user name created in the panel. This name could be anything. It doesn’t have to be related at all to your email. This can be nice when you have a number of emails coming into one inbox. However, for some reason this user name doesn’t just have to be unique to your account, but to the server you are on! So if there is another ‘tyler’ on the server, well, that can’t be my email user name.
• When you FTP into the server, you can navigate up one level and see every users folder on the server. While I do not have permission to enter these folders… it just bothered me that I could even see them. I am no security expert, so I can’t say if that is a security issue or not. My gut just felt uncomfortable by it.

So.. good bye WebFaction. It was a fun 10 months.

Hello MediaTemple.. I guess you knew i’d be back right? Third time’s the charm? I hope so.